


Puzzle Pieces From Above

by lilyhandmaiden



Category: 12 Monkeys (TV)
Genre: Blood, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Dr. Bandara, Dubious Science, Gen, Mental Institutions, Minor Character Death, One of a team of lawyers, Primary Problems, Suicidal Thoughts, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-12
Updated: 2020-11-17
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:35:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26424991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilyhandmaiden/pseuds/lilyhandmaiden
Summary: As a Primary, Jennifer Goines can see the whole puzzle from above—only it’s in pieces, jumbled, out of order, no corners, no edges, no straight lines. Each piece is a glimpse, a window onto a moment in time. These are some of the pieces that fit together to make up Jennifer’s life, in all its tangles of causality.One Jennifer-centric vignette inspired by each episode
Relationships: Jennifer Goines & Leland Goines, Jennifer Goines/Henri Toussaint
Comments: 6
Kudos: 3





	1. Splinter

**Author's Note:**

> I'm issuing myself this challenge to write more and more quickly. Here's hoping it works!
> 
> A tip of the hat to the beginning of Terry Pratchett's Soul Music, which the final scene of "Splinter" always reminds me of, and which served as inspiration for this first vignette.

Obviously, she would have to be told. There was no question about that—no _real_ question. Still, no one was particularly eager to do it. They made all the arrangements first, went through all the paperwork, until the only things left to do were notify the daughter and go public—and they did the former first less out of common courtesy and more because they were still solidifying the cover story for the press release.

In the end, Wilson quite literally drew the short straw and headed up to J.D. Peoples Mental Hospital in Philadelphia.

“She’s not having a good day,” the attendant warned him as she buzzed him in. “She’s agitated. You sure you don’t want a guard in there? All right. Hit the alarm if you need us.”

Wilson had known Jennifer before. He hadn’t liked her, necessarily—no one really _liked_ her—but she’d been brilliant, he had to admit that. It was sad to see her now, like this. She didn’t acknowledge him when he entered, just kept drawing on the wall—the face of a screaming monkey.

Well, there was no sense beating around the bush or trying to soften the blow.

“There’s been, uh, an accident. Your father’s dead. I’m sorry.” No reaction. Just the continued scratch of charcoal on drywall. “There’ll be some papers to sign... Your father left you a great deal of money.” Still nothing. The people who didn’t react to the death usually reacted to the money.

Wilson felt irritated all over again that Leland hadn’t altered his will after... the incident. But it wasn’t as though there was any other kin, and it wasn’t as though any of them had thought Leland Goines could actually be harmed. Wilson could remember a time—many times, actually—when Leland had spoken confidently about building Markridge into an empire while Jennifer had hovered behind him, his shadow.

He felt an unfamiliar stirring of emotion that prompted him to say, “I know if he were here, he’d tell you he always wanted you to carry on his work. He may not have shown it, but he considered you his... legacy.”

Wilson sighed as Leland Goines’s legacy continued to darken the fur around the monkey’s face. “Jennifer... are you hearing me?”

And finally, she turned to him. Flecks of charcoal were speckled across her pale face. Jennifer grinned, and then she started to laugh—a deep, guttural laugh like she had just heard some sort of joke. Then she turned back with renewed vigor to the monkey face on the wall.

Involuntarily, Wilson shivered. But maybe this was shock? Wilson had been shocked, after all, and he was only one of a team of lawyers. The sudden death of a parent would be difficult for anybody to absorb. And even if circumstances had been more normal, he wouldn’t necessarily have expected a normal reaction. Leland and Jennifer’s relationship had always been... complex. He had once heard Jennifer declare, “ _My father is God!_ ” and hadn’t been sure if she’d been kidding or not. He rarely was sure, with Jennifer. She’d always been a bit... unsettling.

“Jennifer,” he tried again. “Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

Jennifer’s hand holding the charcoal slowed, stopped, pulled away from the wall. Her laughter sputtered out, and she stood there, studying the monkey face as though she expected it to speak to her. Then she turned back to Wilson, and for a second, she could have passed for her old self, presented with an interesting problem, working through it, making connections no one else could make.

“No,” she said with a jerky shake of her head. “But don’t worry. I will... in time.” That seemed to strike her as funny, and she laughed again. “Get it? ‘In _time_?’”

Her laughter pitched up into the hysterical, and Wilson took that as his cue. He hurried out of the room and didn’t slow down until he was in the parking lot, breathing in the fresh, frigid air.

Back in his car, he called the office. “It’s done. I told her.”

“And how did she take it?”

Wilson was silent for a moment. He felt stupid, but he had to say it out loud. “It was like... It was like she already _knew_. On some level.”

***

Back in room 248, Jennifer’s hands tingled and her voices screamed.

_Everything’s changing, green to red_.

_Green to red... to dead_.

“Daddy’s dead,” she told the monkey. “My daddy’s dead. Dead as a doornail. Rotting.” She laughed until she was doubled over, until she slid to the floor, until she was sobbing like a lost little girl.

Her daddy was dead, and Jennifer Goines had never felt so alone.

Her daddy was dead, and Jennifer Goines had never felt so _alive_.


	2. Mentally Divergent

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "They made me kill people. Good people who bought me lunch."  
> "773 days locked in a cell, apologizing to ghosts."

The blood was pooling under her knees, seeping into one sock by the time security finally showed up with their clipboards and their guns. She hadn’t moved. She couldn’t. And the knife was still in her hand.

The world smelled like lavender and jasmine.

It had been eleven minutes.

 _Rewind_.

Jennifer was nervous her first day at Markridge, with her freshly-printed Masters degree, her prescription for a new medication, and her shiny outpatient treatment plan. When she entered the lab for the first time, the voices in her head started an insistent whisper: _Jennifer Jennifer 607 Witness blood on snow twelve monkeys marching always marching around the night room complete with evening stars_... But she did her best to ignore them. They were fading, they’d be gone soon—no more voices, no more variables—and she had to make a good first impression, prove to Daddy, to _everyone_ that she could do this. The feeling that something bad was going to have happened here was just her anxiety about meeting her new coworkers—her team.

She practiced what she would say to them, muttering under her breath, “Hi, I’m Jennifer Goines. No—Hello, I’m Jennifer, nice to meet you. _Pleasure_ to meet you. I’m Jennifer, you may have heard of—no. The name’s Goines, Jennifer Goines. Yes, _that_ Goines, boss’s daughter—ugh. Jennifer Goines, best wishes. Warmest regards.”

Someone tapped on her shoulder, and she gasped and spun around. A man in a labcoat was standing there, backed by two other men and a woman, also in labcoats.

“You must be Jennifer,” the man said in what she would later learn was a Haitian accent. “I’m Dr. Henri Toussaint. Welcome to the team.”

“Yes. Thank you. Jennifer Goines. It’s good to be here.”

And she was so relieved that was over with that she forgot to actually listen to the others’ names, but that ended up being okay because she nicknamed them, and they loved that. When noon rolled around, Specs (the one with glasses) said, “Do you want to join us across the street for lunch?”

Once they got to the little diner across the street with the apparently great sandwiches, though, she discovered that, in her nervous frenzy to leave on time, she’d forgotten her wallet at home. This wouldn’t have been a problem in the Markridge cafeteria, where she’d been expecting to eat alone, like high school.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Curly (because he had curly hair and a Three Stooges-like sense of physical comedy that was perhaps out of place in a lab setting, but Jennifer wasn’t going to be the one to say that). “We’ve got you.”

“Oh! Uh... are you sure?”

She was the boss’s daughter. She’d had more money in a trust fund the day she was born than any of them would make in ten years. They certainly knew that. If anything, she should be treating them to free lunches in perpetuity, except that would be condescending, wouldn’t it?

But Dolly (because she had an almost annoyingly sunny personality and had spent all morning humming “9 to 5”) just smiled. “Of course. We were always going to get yours anyway. It’s your first day!”

Henri must have noticed her looking dumbfounded, because he nudged her and said, “You can get ours next time.”

They could have been doing this because they knew who she was, and they weren’t about to let the boss’s daughter starve. But she looked in their eyes and knew they were just doing it because she was their new colleague, and this was how they would treat anyone. These were good people.

But what, beyond that, did she actually know about them? This seemed very important suddenly. What were their hobbies? Did they have families?

 _Fast forward_.

Jennifer had never let her guard down much at Markridge. As much as she’d wished she could make friends there, she’d never been very friendly, always afraid of Daddy, of the bad thing coming, of the voices and visions and how her coworkers would look at her if they knew those whispers never quite went away. Markridge Jennifer was Serious and Focused, or at least she tried to be, because if she slipped up even a little...

So she’d been _on_ the team, but she’d never really been a _part_ of the team, always somehow on the outside, looking in. Still, surely somewhere, somewhen...

_Fast forward._

They weren’t quite as smart as her, but they were smart, and they had more degrees. Curly told bad jokes. Dolly hummed. Specs brought donuts sometimes. They called her Jenny, and she’d never been a Jenny, but she’d never corrected them. They’d published some articles together, and they won an award once, as a team.

_Fast forward..._

Did they have elderly parents? Husbands and wives? Oh God, did they have _kids_? Didn’t Curly have a picture of kids at his workstation?

What were their actual _names_?

_Fast forward... fast forward..._

Curly was by the door, and the tall man never even asked him anything. Jennifer heard the _thud_ as he hit the floor and turned to see blood pouring out of him. Then she, Dolly, and Specs were on their knees and the man asked, “Where. Is. The Night Room?” but the others didn’t know and Henri was still in the closet where they hung up the Hazmat suits. Only Jennifer knew how to find it.

They cried and they begged. If she told... The knife opened up Dolly’s throat. If she said something... Henri ran, unnoticed, got away, thank God. Specs was shaking and sobbing. If she could form the words... save the one, save the dying man... But something in her brain was cracking like thin ice, and by the time the knife cut through Specs’s neck, it had broken, and she felt herself falling down and down inside her head. She looked into Specs’s eyes, and Dolly’s, and Curly’s, and she knew that they were dead, and all the air was stolen from her lungs and all the words were stolen from her mind, and the voices rushed in to fill the void, screaming, _Jennifer Witness twelve monkeys climb the steps marching the dying man Cole time changing green to red blood red forest ring the bell the origin the clock the traveler Titan Jennifer Jennifer JENNIFER_ —

“Jennifer!”

 _Stop_.

“Jennifer!”

Her father was in front of her. The knife was no longer in her hand. Two hours had passed.

“Daddy?”

“Jennifer.” Leland Goines sighed deeply, in either relief or dismay. “What happened?”

“He got away. One got away. Did they find him?”

“From the beginning, Jennifer.”

So she told him about the pale, tall man, all in black, from the Army of the 12 Monkeys. “Daddy, he said he _knew_ you.” Jennifer had never seen her father look so horrified. “He wanted to know where it was.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “The Night Room.”

He grabbed her by the arms and squeezed hard. “Did you tell him?”

“No! I couldn’t—I didn’t—I’d never—I’m not—” Jennifer hadn’t cried until then. Tears came fast as she sobbed, “I’m not a monster, Daddy.”

Leland Goines let go, stepped back, drew a shaky hand over his face. “And you haven’t told this to anyone else?” Jennifer shook her head. “All right. That’s good, Jennifer. All right. Listen to me. Nothing has changed. You never, ever, _ever_ mention... that place, or what’s in there. Not to anyone. People are going to come talk to you, and when they ask you questions, you don’t mention that place. I’ll take care of this. Don’t worry.”

So when the people did come—the police, probably—she left out that part. They made her tell the story again and again, and every time it seemed like more of the details slipped between her fingers, and the memory that was so clear when she went into her head became blurry, distorted, like she had watched it all unfold from beneath the water in her bathtub. More and more, her answers were, “I don’t... I can’t remember. I don’t _know_.” When the asked her directly _why_ the Army of the 12 Monkeys would kill those people, what they wanted, she said nothing.

Then they said, “Your father says you’ve been obsessed with monkeys since you were a child. And numbers.”

“Not twelve,” Jennifer said. “Only primaries. Twelve’s not primary. Daddy knows that.”

“And why do you think you were the only one left unharmed?”

Jennifer shook her head. “One got away.”

“Why were you the only one _in the room_ who wasn’t killed?”

“...I don’t know.”

This hurt too much. She couldn’t bear it.

 _Retreat_.

In the Night Room, with the evening stars above, she looked for Henri and couldn’t find him.

“The one that got away.” She chuckled to herself. The pain was duller here, like it was happening a long way away.

She worked for a while, sorting samples—easy, calming work. After a time, Specs joined her, and they worked quietly side by side.

“Do you want to join us?” he asked eventually.

Jennifer stopped what she was doing. “Yes. And no.” She started to work again, then stopped. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t tell him. I promised.” Specs didn’t respond. “I mean, we all knew what was at stake, right? If someone like that found Daddy’s secret... well, first _he_ would blow up. And then... Apocalypse, four horsemen, end times, red forest... And I’m not— _not_ —the monster who destroys the world. No. Not today.” She looked up at Specs, and blood flowed from his neck onto his labcoat. “I’m sorry. I’m _so_ sorry. Please... You understood, right? One for seven billion, that’s just bad math, that’s... You wouldn’t have told him, either.” Jennifer paused, realizing. “You couldn’t have. You didn’t know... You were never here. You don’t belong here.”

 _Wake up_.

A day had passed, and then some—26 hours.

She was in another room—it looked like a hospital—with another group of people.

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “Can you... can you tell their families I’m sorry? It was my fault. It was all my fault.” She wiped away tears. “Did you find the one who got away?”

“Are you confessing to killing those people, Jennifer?” a doctor asked, using his kind-person-talking-to-crazy-person voice.

Jennifer shook her head. “But I didn’t stop it.”

“Then who did kill them?”

“The Army of the 12 Monkeys. The tall man. I’ve _said_ this. I’ve said this, haven’t I?”

“And have you seen this ‘Army of the 12 Monkeys’ man before, during your psychotic episodes?”

“...What?”

“The Army of the 12 Monkeys is not a real organization, Jennifer. We’ve checked.”

“ _Check harder_. Check the security footage! Are you _stupid_?”

“Jennifer, there’s no record of anyone else entering that lab.”

“No! No, no, that’s _not_...”

“Did this ‘Army of the 12 Monkeys’ make you kill them, Jennifer?”

_Get out of there._

Back in the Night Room, the evening stars formed a spotlight on Dolly, her labcoat dripping with tassels and rhinestones... and blood.

“Dolly, I’m—I’m sorry. It should’ve been me. Not you.”

Dolly shrugged. “We were always going to get yours anyway.”

Jennifer blinked. “What?”

But a driving beat was emanating from somewhere. Dolly tapped her foot and sang into the microphone in her hand: “Working 9 to 5, what a way to make a living/ Barely getting by, it’s all taking and no giving/ They just use your mind—” She marched up to Jennifer and tapped the side of her head with one finger. “—and they never give you credit!”

Dolly shoved the mic in her face. Uncertainly, Jennifer sang, “It’s enough to drive you _crazy_ if you let it…?”

“9 to 5!” Dolly belted, before handing the mic back over to Jennifer.

“For service and devotion/ You would think that I would deserve a fair promotion!”

“Want to move ahead, but the boss won’t seem to let me!”

They both leaned in to share the microphone. “ _I swear sometimes that man is out to get me!!_ ”

Another voice cut in. “Jennifer, please stop singing.”

 _Come back_.

It had been three days. There was another man there with her, one she’d seen before but couldn’t place.

“Please. This is for the record.”

Oh. He was one of the lawyers.

“I need you to sign this. It’s a transcript of your earlier statements.”

He placed a paper in front of her and handed her a pen. Instantly her hand began to move, sketching out the familiar lines of the screaming monkey, like scratching an itch she hadn’t known was there until that second. But the crafty lawyer had come prepared. He pulled the paper out from under her hand and produced a second copy.

“Sign this, Jennifer, and you won’t have to go to court, okay?”

 _Just close your eyes. Fast forward. Just a little further_.

She was relieved to be back in the lab, the regular lab. Henri didn’t seem to be here, either, but Curly was seated at his workstation. Jennifer sidled over, trying to get a peek at that picture on his desk, to see if there were, in fact, kids in it. But then Curly looked up at her, and she froze.

“I’m sorry. I never got to know you, I never just asked…” She sighed. “Or maybe I did, and I just can't remember now. I keep forgetting... It’s my fault. Maybe I thought it would be awkward… and you’d think… Anyway, I was an asshole. So… I’m gonna ask now. What’s your name, Curly?”

Curly shrugged. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Well, I’m _very_ worried about it, because now you’re—”

The tall, pale man came up behind Curly and slit his throat. Curly crumpled to the floor.

Jennifer gasped for breath that wouldn’t come. She sank to her knees. Her lips formed the words _the Night Room_ , but blood was welling up in her own throat, cutting off her voice. She clutched at her neck. There was no wound there, but a metallic taste filled her mouth anyway. The tall man dropped petals of lavender and jasmine. She looked up, up into his smiling face, silently pleading, and saw, standing behind him, her mother. Caroline Markridge was dripping wet in a floral print dress, like she always was, hair obscuring her face. Still, Jennifer’s first instinct was to reach out to her.

Caroline did not move to help her choking, drowning, dying daughter.

 _Wait_ , Jennifer thought. _This isn’t right. You don’t belong here._

She coughed blood onto the floor, and it came out as water.

_Wake up, wake up, WAKE UP._

The number on the door in front of her was 248. Jennifer hit the brakes on the chair that was wheeling her toward it, and the orderly pushing it careened into the back.

Jennifer stood up. Her muscles ached from sitting so long.

“No,” she said. Her voice sounded rusty, too. “No, no, no, 248’s not primary. No. I need a prime number.”

The orderly looked startled. “Rooms are assigned? You don’t get to make requests.”

“607. Put me in 607.”

“Uh… we don’t have a room 607.”

“I should be in 607. _Not_ here!”

“This building doesn’t even have six floors.”

The world around her felt wrong. Jennifer took in the hallway, with its scuffed walls and floors, its antiseptic smell, its lost-looking people, and she knew what kind of place this was—she’d been here before, when she was 13, 18, 22. There were more locks on the doors this time. The feeling of wrongness welled up into panic inside her like blood, like water, like the whispered secrets of a thousand different Jennifers.

“I shouldn’t be here.”

The orderly was slowly approaching her, backing her toward the door. Jennifer shoved the chair back, knocking her over, and ran toward the emergency exit at the end of the hall. Someone called for security. Within seconds, two men tackled her, which hurt, but she kicked and bit and screamed anyway as they walked her back the way she’d come.

They shoved her into Room 248, but she couldn’t be in there, so she tried to smash her way out with a chair. One of the guards came in to stop her and, not wanting to get tackled again, she switched tactics and took her shirt off. The guard stopped short, not sure how to proceed, while she stared him down in her bra, and that was how the doctor from the hospital, the one with the kind voice and eyes like a snake, found them.

“Jennifer, I’m Dr. Bandara.”

“Does my father know I’m here?” she demanded. “Frankly, this facility is way below par. Let me talk to a supervisor, and get my father on the phone! He can tell you that the Army of the 12 Monkeys—”

“Isn’t real, Jennifer. They aren’t real. Your father knows that. They’re in your head,” the doctor said, right before he stuck the needle in her arm. The room spun, the lights went fuzzy, and she was gone.

 _Wake up_.

Curly, Specs, and Dolly stood in front of her, all in a row.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry. But I can’t save you. If I save you, the world dies. So you can stop haunting me now, okay? Please. Please just leave me alone.”

“We’ve got you,” Curly said.

“What? What does that _mean_?”

“We were always going to get yours,” Dolly responded cheerfully.

Specs smiled, too. “Do you want to join us?”

And then it clicked. “Ohhhh, my God,” Jennifer laughed to herself. “Oh my God. You’re _replays_! You’re stuck in my head on a loop! I’m right, aren’t I? Come on, prove me wrong! Curly, what’re your kids’ names?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Dolly, cat person or dog person?”

“It’s your first day!”

“Specs, where were you born?”

“Across the street for lunch?”

“Curly— _what’s your name_?”

“Don’t worry about it,” she and Curly said in unison.

“Oh, come _on_!” Jennifer shouted. “Come on, _one_ of you—just tell me something— _anything_ —even if you’re just up here,” she knocked on the side of her skull, “I’ve got to remember _something_! If I just rewind... rewind...” She pressed her eyelids shut. “Give me just one thing! _Come on!_ ”

She opened her eyes, and the tall man from the Army of the 12 Monkeys was at her side, smiling at her. He handed her the knife.

Jennifer looked up at her coworkers, her team, just standing there, silent. Rage at them surged from her toes up, and visions from the other monsters in her head—Kyle, Lillian—flashed before her, showed her what she was capable of. And it didn't matter, did it? They were already dead. Everyone was already dead. Jennifer lunged, closed her eyes—just one quick slash and she felt the knife cut through clothes, skin, flesh—and she opened her eyes to so much blood.

_This is wrong._

_Isn’t it?_

_Wake up!_

Jennifer sat on a tiny bed in the most even-numbered room imaginable and stared at the wall. The wall was blank, empty—they hadn’t given her charcoals yet, but they would, and then she’d sketch them the world.

At Markridge, there had been so much to distract her, so many problems to solve. The voices had been quiet in comparison. Now there were only blank walls, and her brain made them a projector screen for her visions. The voices came in a surround-sound cacophony. The pills they gave her here didn’t help, only made her dizzy and nauseated. That was the problem she was working on currently—how to hide the pills. She hadn’t solved it yet, but she would, if only everyone would just _shut up_. Jennifer covered her ears, hoping to drown out the voices with the sound of her own breathing, her own blood rushing through her veins.

When she opened her eyes, Specs, Curly, and Dolly were there again.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I'm sorry you're dead. I'm sorry I wasn't braver. And I’m sorry I never knew you. You were good people. I’m sorry I can't remember your names.”

“We’ve got you,” Curly said.

“Do you want to join us?” Specs asked.

It had been ninety-four days.


	3. Cassandra Complex

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HENRI: Markridge had us working in the Night Room on viral gene therapy. Take the DNA out of a virus, you can use it to deliver medicine instead of a poison, but you need a very powerful virus.  
> COLE: And that’s what you and Jennifer were working on before the killings.  
> HENRI: If you want Jennifer to do something, you ask her not to. Took me years to figure that out.
> 
> HENRI: Even if those bastards get their hands on Jenny, they won’t be able to break her.

When Jennifer first met Henri Toussaint, he was kind and welcoming, certainly, but also, it was clear that his expectations for her were not high. As de facto team leader, he had her do all the easiest and most repetitive tasks, all the errands, all the coffee runs—which was fine, at first, but she knew that if her brain didn’t get some new stimulus soon, it was going to occupy her in other ways, and soon she’d be sketching visions in the corners.

So one day, after everyone else had gone home, she approached him, took a deep breath, and said, “I’m not actually stupid. Just so you know.”

Henri looked up, as though he’d just noticed she was still there. “What? Oh, no, of course you’re not. I don’t think you’re—”

“Yes. You do. It’s understandable. I mean—I come in here, boss’s daughter, no doctorate, no real experience, nepotism at its finest. I get it. But I can actually do stuff. I can do the DNA extraction. I know my way around a centrifuge. I skipped the PhD for personal reasons, not academic ones, so. I actually did my Master’s thesis on genetic manipulation for animal cloning using salvaged DNA. Big _Jurassic Park_ vibes.” A nervous laugh. “Okay. Bye.”

She turned and started for the door, but stopped when she heard Henri ask, “Why salvaged DNA?” Jennifer turned back, eyebrows raised. “I mean…” Henri shrugged. “ _Jurassic Park_ didn’t exactly turn out well for the scientists.”

“My father’s company specializes in bending nature to the whims of man. No matter who or what gets hurt in the process. I was a kid when I found out about all the animals he kept in cages for testing, experimentation… I understand now why we have to do it. But I just thought… might be nice if the animals could strike back once in a while. If I could bring back a friendly triceratops, a mastodon…” She pushed her glasses back up her nose and let a small smile slip through. “A cute little dodo.”

“So… ‘dinosaur eats man, woman inherits the company?’”

Jennifer snorted out a surprised laugh, then covered her mouth in embarrassment. Henri smiled.

***

Henri had maybe one of the most gorgeous smiles Jennifer had ever seen—one of those smiles that lit up a room. This made it difficult at times for her to keep her head down and focus on her new job at Markridge the way she’d promised her father and herself she would do.

But in another way, it made it incredibly easy, because she discovered as the months went on that he would smile at her whenever she rattled off long numerical sequences she’d memorized on the spot, or when she made a connection no one else had thought of.

Sometimes she would catch his eye, and he’d be smiling at her for what seemed like no reason at all. But, she figured, he was just being nice. Henri was nice to everyone.

***

Their team had been working on viral gene therapy for months, but they’d dead-ended on a malaria treatment that had, initially, shown a lot of promise. They just couldn’t find a virus powerful enough to make it work.

When she and Henri had brought the issue to the higher-ups on behalf of their team, she had been prepared for her father to be disappointed in her. Angry, even. She hadn’t anticipated that he would suggest, in an alarmingly casual, almost offhand way, that they experiment with a virus called M5-10.

“No! Daddy—Daddy, you can’t be serious. Are you _joking?_ Is this your first-ever science-based _joke?_ ”

Henri was startled at the vehemence of her reaction. “Jenny, why not? We’ve tried everything else.”

“M5-10, it’s—it’s _bad news_. It’s like, _Outbreak_ , _Contagion_ , _28 Days Later_ —”

“Isn’t that a zombie movie?”

“Doesn’t matter!”

“We’ll arrange a secure laboratory, of course,” her father said. “You and Dr. Toussaint can even draw up the specs yourselves, run them by me for approval. Obviously, I don’t intend to open us up to liability here.” He looked at the other men and women around the conference table, and they all shared a chuckle.

Jennifer just shook her head. “No. No, this is a _bad_ idea.”

“I appreciate your input, Jennifer, but this isn’t actually your call. I’d like to move forward on finding a way to make this virus marketable, one way or another, and I’m sure we’d all prefer it be with a worthy project like this.” The bosses nodded at one another, smug in their temporary righteousness. Jennifer, however, heard the threat implicit in her father’s words: this, or something more ethically dubious. This, or weaponization, maybe. “Dr. Toussaint, are you on board?” Leland asked.

Henri looked to Jennifer, uncertain. She grabbed his arm.

“Don’t. It’s too dangerous.”

“Come on, Jennifer.” Her father’s impatient voice made her jump. “Do you really want to prevent Dr. Toussaint from saving countless lives? Men, women, children all over the world—people like your sister, Henri. If she’d had a treatment like this...”

Jennifer looked at Henri’s face and knew she had lost.

***

The silence between them was tense as they walked back to their lab. Finally, Jennifer asked, “What happened to your sister?”

“She died, when we were kids. Measles. We didn’t have access to the vaccine growing up. I was her big brother, and I couldn’t do anything.”

“I’m sorry.” Jennifer reached her hand out to him, then pulled it back. “I’m really sorry.”

Henri kept his eyes trained on the ground. “Thanks.”

“But... you know measles isn’t a protozoan infection. It can’t be treated with virotherapy. Daddy’s manipulating you—it’s what he does.”

“But does it matter what disease it is? If one more kid doesn’t have to lose his sister to malaria, or leukemia, or... whatever else? This could be the breakthrough we’ve been searching for.”

“Okay, but... if this virus gets out—I mean, especially if we’ve bioengineered the hell out of it—How many kids would die then?”

“I don’t know. But Jenny...” Henri stopped and turned to face her. “We’ll be the only ones with access to the virus. We’ll be in a controlled environment with protective gear. There will be safety measures in place. What are you afraid is going to happen?”

“Something bad.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know! Just _something._ Like, end-of-the-world level bad.”

“Look. If this were almost anywhere else, I would agree with you. But this is Markridge! This is one of the most state-of-the-art, cutting-edge companies of its kind. The safety and security protocols are the best in the entire world. I’ve worked my whole life to get in somewhere like this, because _bad things don’t happen here_.”

Jennifer blinked at him. “Bad things can happen anywhere.”

But Henri was looking past her, into a bright, shiny future. “We are so close— _so close_ —to doing what used to seem impossible—to controlling the deadliest forces of nature and using them for _good_. Don’t you want to be a part of that?”

Jennifer could have pointed out that it didn’t work like that—that nature can’t be broken. Maybe she should have. But she looked into Henri’s eyes and saw a good man—a brilliant doctor whose tragic backstory had only motivated him to save the lives of others. Given half the chance, Henri Toussaint was going to save the world.

She couldn’t bring herself to screw that up—one way or the other.

“Nuh-uh.” Jennifer said, shaking her head. “No way. Count me out.”

***

He called her “Jenny.” She had never been a Jenny before, but Henri made her want to be one. She wanted to be the person he saw when he smiled at her.

The Jenny Henri saw was probably a great dancer and a winning conversationalist, with her impeccable fashion sense and her luxurious hair. _Jenny_ would go for a run every morning before work and meet up with her many friends at a bar at the end of the day. _Jenny_ had totally normal childhood memories and a happy family she visited on weekends. Most of all, Jenny never heard or saw things that weren’t there, and so she never had to worry about whether or not something in front of her was real. Jenny wasn’t crazy, and Jenny wasn’t a monster. She could not see, at the end of the path before her, another self holding a vial and then letting go.

***

“I’m designing a vault,” Henri told her one day at her workstation. “At your father’s request, for the offsite lab. To keep M5-10 secure.”

“Great.” Jennifer offered him a tight smile. “Good for you. Congratulations.”

“I thought maybe, if you could see it, and you approved, you’d reconsider joining me there?”

“Uh, no. Sorry. You’re on your own with this one.” Impulsively, as he started to walk away from her, Jennifer took his hand. “You be careful in there, okay?”

He looked startled. “Of course.”

“I mean it.” She leaned in close to him. “‘Keep it secret. Keep it safe.’”

“ _Lord of the Rings_?”

“Yeah.” Jennifer giggled, then her face reset into severity. “But seriously.”

“I know.” Henri should have looked reassuring, but to Jennifer he only looked hopelessly naive.

“You don’t. Wait till you see it.”

He walked away, and she went back to sketching the skull with the dead, deadly eyes on the back of her observational notes.

***

She had felt it building up all day, the pressure behind her eyes, an oncoming storm in her brain. She kept shaking her head to clear it, like she was trying to get water, not whispers, out of her ears. When her coworkers asked if she was okay, she said it was a migraine and hoped that the worst of it would just hold off until the end of the workday.

But no such luck. Light exploded into her world, and then the visions came rapid-fire—the origin, a snake, a monkey, the countless dead, a machine in a spotlight, the steps, the vial in her hand, the red forest—and in her bones, she could feel time curving and writhing.

“Jenny? Are you all right? Jennifer?”

“Green to red, the leaves are changing. Everything’s changing…”

“What? What’s changing?”

“Green to red. Everything’s changing, green to red.”

“Jenny?”

It was _here,_ it was happening, and she had to make them see—to warn them. She grasped for the right words. “Everything’s changing, green to red.”

Time danced around her, barreled through her like a train on a track, and caught her in a knot. From a long way away, she could hear, “What’s the matter with her? Should we get someone?”

“Everything’s changing, green to red. Everything’s changing, green to red.”

***

“It was like… you were here, but you weren’t,” Henri said, days later, once she’d mustered up the courage to return to work. The others had smiled, been kind, and carefully avoided bringing up what had happened. She knew they’d never look at her the same way. She’d messed up everything.

She pressed her eyes to her microscope, even though there was nothing on the slide, just to avoid looking at him. “Yeah. Sorry. It happens sometimes. Must’ve gotten the dosage wrong on my meds. Stupid.”

“I know you, Jenny. You’re not stupid.”

“Nope.” She laughed ruefully. “Just crazy.”

She froze as she felt his hand touch her arm.

“Not that, either. You’re strong.”

She did look up at him then, eyebrows furrowed, but before she could say anything, Specs approached them with a nervous smile. “Uh, did you know there’s nothing on your slide?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Jennifer replied through gritted teeth.

“Okay. Well...” He looked down at his tie as he fidgeted with it, avoiding eye contact. “Don’t worry about the centrifuge. I can operate it today.”

“Why?” Jennifer asked.

“Well, it’s just... I thought you might still be recovering from...”

Jennifer pointedly grabbed the sample vials from the table in front of her, marched them across the lab, and loaded them into the centrifuge.

“See?” Henri called after her. “Stronger than you think.”

***

“I’m just saying,” Henri said, “if you worked _with_ me, we could make the offsite lab that much safer.”

Jennifer shook her head. “No. It’s… not a good idea. For me. To be around this thing. Or any of the stuff they keep off site. To have that kind of information, even. So.”

“Jenny. Come on, you know that’s nonsense.”

“Uh, no it’s not! You’ve seen me—you _saw_ what happened the other day. When Jennifer Goines left the building? Are we just going to pretend like that didn’t happen?”

“But no one got hurt. Nothing got broken.”

“ _This_ time! But just by being in that lab, I’d up the chances of apocalypse by—”

“Is that what you’re really afraid of? Trusting _yourself_ around the virus?”

Jennifer looked at Henri looking at her, so full of concern, and tears welled up in her eyes. She sniffed and brushed them away, along with all the words she couldn’t say. “You should be afraid of me, too,” she said quietly.

“Well, I’m not. I’m going to need you there, Jenny. You’re the smartest person on this team. If we get this right—this could change the world.”

“You know what else would change the world? Everybody dying, end of humanity as we know it because we get this _wrong_! Why won’t anybody _listen_ to me?!”

“I’m listening, Jenny. You’re afraid that we might bring about end of the world. You’re so afraid, you never think about how we have the chance to save it. To defeat death from disease!”

“That’s not—you sound like _them,_ like my father, like all the Markridge men acting like you can control things you _can’t_. But you don’t know! You don’t _get_ it!”

“What don’t I know? _Explain_ it to me, Jenny.”

She just shook her head again as more tears slipped from the corners of her eyes.

Henri sighed. “You know, if anyone’s acting like your father, it’s you. You act like the work we do is some sort of game—you want to bioengineer a dodo because it’s _fun_? Because maybe it would irritate powerful people? But we have the opportunity to help people who have no power. To improve and save lives. If you can’t see those lives as _real_ , if you want to be that selfish—fine. Don’t help. You’re right, I don’t want you there.”

He stormed off, leaving her in the lab alone.

***

The next day, Jennifer sidled up to Henri as though nothing had happened.

“So… Daddy wasn’t sure about me going to the Night Room at first—for security reasons. You know. Because.” She pointed at her head and grimaced, making an _errgh_ sound. “But I wore him down eventually.”

Jennifer beamed.

Henri frowned, confused. “What? You— _what_?”

“The Night Room. I know it’s called the Night Room now. You’ll notice I’m keeping my voice low so as not to attract the others’ attention—there’s a hot security tip for you. Anyway, I’m coming with you.”

“You—you changed your mind?”

“Well... yeah.” For the first time that day, she made direct eye contact with him. “You’re wrong about me. It’s not that I don’t care…” She struggled to tell him, _I’m not the Jenny you think I am._ But he spoke first.

“I know that. I shouldn’t have said... what I said to you.”

“But you were right about one thing. Maybe… it’s going to happen one way or another. World has to end sometime, nothing lasts forever. But I could help—I could try to help. Maybe then, it won’t be as bad. At least we’ll be together.”

Henri smiled, and the room lit up. “And we’ll watch out for each other. I promise, Jenny. It’s going to be fine.”

In that moment, she almost believed him.

***

So Jennifer, knowing in her bones it was a bad idea, nonetheless escorted the 1100-year-old human remains that were the origin of the M5-10 virus to the Night Room and helped install them into a vault only she could open. She shrank under the gaze of the origin’s dead, desiccated eyes, feeling that they could somehow still see her and all the Jennifers she had been and would be.

While Henri ran experiments, Jennifer ran security drills by setting off the alarms at random intervals, until Markridge security—very annoyed but nonetheless professional—cut their response time to the Night Room from 43 minutes down to 20.

Jennifer and Henri brought results back to their team that, over time, set their work ahead by leaps and bounds.

And because of this, they won an award for which they were recognized in front of the whole company at the annual Markridge Gala.

***

The gala was mostly boring, but it had good snacks and decent music. Jennifer was wearing a dark red dress and her hair had been done professionally, like it was prom—which was nice, because she’d never gotten to actually go to her prom. At dinner, she noticed people looking at her in a way that was less unsettled and more admiring that usual, and she tried accordingly to act the part of the post-makeover heroine at the ball, smiling a lot and flitting from one group to another. She was even chatting with Oliver Peters, who had always made her skin crawl a little, when her left contact folded up in her eye.

Jennifer didn’t see a restroom nearby, so she stepped out on to the heated terrace to try to fix it. That was how Henri found her, facing out into the night.

At the sound of footsteps hesitantly approaching, she started and whirled around. “Oh! Whoa! You scared me.”

“I’m sorry, I…” Henri studied her. “Are you all right?”

Jennifer dabbed at her watering eye and realized she must look like she was crying. “Oh, no, it’s—my contact is messed up. I’m trying to… Hang on, sorry. Look away if you have a thing about people touching their eyeballs. …Ah! Got it.”

Jennifer rubbed a few more errant tears from her cheek. Henry looked at her and laughed.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You look slightly like you’ve been punched in the face.”

Jennifer turned her phone’s camera to selfie mode and winced. Her eye was pink and puffy, and it was surrounded by dark makeup smudges where she’d rubbed it.

“ _Fuck_. I can’t go back in like this, people will think I’ve gone all… _raah_ … and Daddy’ll go ballistic.”

“Okay,” Henri said. “Then we’ll stay out here.”

She should have told him, _You don’t have to do that_. But she didn’t. Instead, she went and sat on the concrete steps leading down into the garden. Henri sat beside her.

“It’s my father’s fault, anyway. He told me to wear contacts for this. I pitched a more ‘sophisticated nerd’ look, but he wanted the whole ‘My Fair Lady’ thing instead. I should just get Lasik, but I get freaked out by the, y’know, ‘laser-in-my-eye’ thing.”

“Well, I don’t think you need to go the surgical route. You could just tell your father ‘no.’ I mean, you never do what anyone _else_ tells you to do. You _certainly_ don’t do what _I_ tell you to do.”

Jennifer laughed uneasily and shook her head. “Naaah.”

Henri studied her. “You’re afraid of him?” He said it without judgment, without horror or disdain. Like it was a completely unloaded question. 

Jennifer fixed her eyes on her shoes. “Hm. Leland Goines likes to play God. Right? The genetic manipulation, the people manipulation... Like, for all intents and purposes, my father is God. And the thing about God is, you can be afraid of his divine retribution and still want him to love you.” She shrugged. “I mean, if he doesn’t, who _will_?”

“Lots of people care about you. The team… me…”

“You?” She looked up and into Henri’s kind, open face.

“Of course.” He let deep breath in, then out. “I like you, Jenny.”

Jennifer didn’t know what to make of that. “...Why?”

“You’re interesting.”

“The Titanic is ‘interesting.’ Chernobyl is ‘interesting.’ Maybe you’re just into disasters.” She looked back down at her shoes. “Maybe you, I don’t know, think you can _fix_ me or something.”

Even with her eyes downcast, Jennifer could tell that Henri did not look away from her. “I don’t think you need anybody to fix you. When I first met you, I thought, ‘oh, this girl got handed this job by her dad, she’ll be no use to anyone.’ But you proved me wrong. I didn’t think I’d find anyone else at Markridge who’d had to fight all their life to be here. But you did, didn’t you? A different fight from mine, but…”

“Yeah, but your childhood traumas spurred you to action. Mine only hold me back.” Jennifer’s voice broke on the end of that sentence and actual tears were suddenly in her eyes. “All the time.”

“No. You’re here. We’re both here.”

Jennifer looked up at Henri to find him eying her with a gaze she found unfathomable. They held like that for a moment, in silence. “…What?” she finally asked.

“I was just noticing your eyes. They’re dark—deep.” Henri half-smiled. “We’ve known each other—what?—two years now? And I never know what’s going on in there.”

“Trust me, you don’t wanna know.”

“Well, they’re beautiful—your eyes.”

They drew closer together, leaning in.

“You have eyes like a golden retriever,” Jennifer blurted out.

Henri laughed. Jennifer laughed, too, until she snorted, which made Henri laugh harder. Whatever tension-filled spell they’d been weaving between them a moment before was effectively broken.

Jennifer heard the opening bars of “Bad Reputation” coming from inside. She stood and held out one hand to Henri. “Wanna dance?”

“Oh. No.” Henri shook his head. “I don’t dance.”

“Oh, come on!” Jennifer whined in protest and pulled him to his feet. “You just have to—” She demonstrated, and Henri attempted to follow. “No, move—move your body.” She laughed. “Come on, nobody’s watching. Just—”

“Jennifer. There you are.” Leland Goines was standing in the doorway. Jennifer froze.

“Daddy.”

Leland took one look at his daughter’s face and rolled his eyes. “Christ, Jennifer.”

“My contacts…” Jennifer tried to explain. “I messed up my makeup.”

“I can see that. Couldn’t you have just fixed it instead of being antisocial out here? The car’s waiting.” Leland Goines gave Henri a long look. “Dr. Toussaint.”

That night, for the first time in two years, Jennifer did not dream about the end of the world.

***

When they returned to the lab on Monday, Jennifer and Henri did not talk about what had happened, or hadn’t happened, or had almost happened between them. For a week, they skirted each other with side-glances and nervous smiles. At the end of each day, Jennifer was the first one out the door, and at the beginning of the next, she was the last one in.

The next week, Jennifer got Lasik on her worse eye, which meant she no longer needed glasses or contacts most of the time. She vowed that, if Henri asked, she would swear up and down that this had nothing to do with either her father or him, even if it was a little bit of both.

Henri didn’t ask. What he asked instead, one day in the Night Room, was if she would like to go out to dinner with him.

“Henri. You can’t just ask me questions like that while I’m holding a sample of a very deadly virus. If I get startled and I drop it, we burn, the world, dies, really a disappointing and disproportionate result all around.”

“I’m sorry. But don’t think it’s escaped my notice that that isn’t an answer.”

Jennifer smiled at the virus on her microscope slide.

The next day, in their regular Markridge team lab, he asked if she’d like to join him for lunch.

Curly, overhearing, said, “Oh, lunch sounds great! Where are we going?” Dolly shushed him and emphatically shook her head.

Jennifer blushed. “You can’t ask me that in front of people!” she whispered.

So the next day, he followed her into the little storage room where they kept the hazmat suits.

She turned, still zipping her suit. “What are you doing in here?”

“Well, if I can’t ask in front of people and I also can’t ask in front of a deadly virus, it seems like this is the only place I _can_ ask you to go on a date with me.”

Jennifer raised her eyebrows. “A date. You’re sure.”

“Yes.”

“Even though I’m… like this. Your boss’s boss’s boss’s daughter. And crazy. And in a hazmat suit.”

“Yes. Well, on the date, you could wear regular clothes instead of the hazmat suit.”

Jennifer shook her head. “I… I can’t. It’s too…”

“All right, then.” Henri folded his arms and looked down, dejected. “If you don’t want to, I’ll just—”

“Okay, so let’s say I’ll go out with you,” Jennifer interrupted, speaking quickly. Henri looked back up at her. “I _want_ to go out with you—you’re very…uh…with your face and your golden retriever eyes and your… but—but we can’t... _ugh_!”

Henri stepped closer to her. “Why not?”

“Daddy reminded me that there’s a company policy against members of the same team forming romantic relationships. One of us would have to be reassigned. And you need me in the Night Room.”

Another step. “Jenny...”

“Besides,” she breathed, “the world is going to end.”

Henri looked down at her, smiling like he already knew what she was going to do next. “You’d better not kiss me, then.”

When their lips crashed together, the voices in her head didn’t stop. The flow of time didn’t change course. But for a few moments, she found all of it, all the noise and alarm bells and gears turning and leaves changing, very easy to tune out.

She exited the hazmat suit room first, ponytail and goggles firmly in place, waiting for Henri to follow at a discreet distance, and tried to focus on the science in front of her. She wasn’t thinking about the M5-10 virus at all when she heard a _thud_ behind her and turned to see Curly on the floor in a growing pool of blood. Standing over him was a tall, pale man, all in black.

In the moment before terror set in, a part of her thought, _Oh. So this is how it happens._

Then she was on her knees, on the floor, alone.

Henri ran. He got away. She never saw him again.


	4. Atari

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a line in this chapter that works on the assumption that the Tall Man is named after his father.
> 
> "It means you're out of moves. You got one move left, whether you like it or not."

Jennifer could tell by the way the dark figures whispered to each other, the way the tall man addressed her with a sharpening edge to his voice, that she was proving to be particularly difficult to torture.

How did one go about torturing someone who’d already spent 773 days locked in a cell, apologizing to ghosts?

They were probably expecting her to go through withdrawal from her meds in her first few days away from JD Peoples, but she’d managed to squirrel away both her red and blue pills often enough over the past few months that the effects were manageable.

So they did their best to disorient her, to make her lose track of time, shutting her up alone in the dark for days, waking her at random intervals, moving her from place to place. Unfortunately for them, time was the one thing Jennifer Goines never really lost track of. She had a knack for it, an internal clock that was always ticking away, letting her know exactly when she was.

The only thing that had ever thrown her off was the red tea they made her drink. Jennifer was no stranger to being drugged, after years of mismanaged medications and uncalled-for sedations. The dizziness, the blurred vision, the limbs too heavy to move, the hallucinations were all familiar to her. What had freaked her out was the sense of being abruptly disconnected from the flow of Time. She’d felt like a fish plucked out of a river, still able to hear it flowing nearby, unable to leap back in. It had been like escaping into her head, but it was another space, not hers, one she’d never been to before but recognized. Like a memory of tomorrow. And she’d recognized the other figure there, too, as it—he? they?—had stalked toward her, full of hostility, then stopped and stared. Glared? Witnessed.

She hadn’t been able to see their eyes through the mask, but she’d felt them on her, pinning her like a butterfly under glass, witnessing her and all that she had been and would be, and there had been nowhere for her to hide. They’d known everything she’d ever do, as though (because) she’d already done it.

Then she had been in her own head, but not alone. The Witness had been there, too, as though it wasn’t crowded enough—just for a moment. Then they’d said, in a voice that sounded almost but not quite familiar, “It’s too messy in here. Do it your way.” And she’d woken up. Slowly, her awareness of time had settled back in.

The Witness had scared her, made her feel vulnerable and violated. Nothing else they Army of the 12 Monkeys could do would come close.

Days went by. The visions came to her more in the dark, and the voices were louder in the silence. That was, admittedly, a problem, but one she was used to. The Monkey men would come to kick her awake after an hour of sleep to find her already muttering into the emptiness, eyes fixed on something they couldn’t see.

She heard one of them in the doorway: “She’s _freaking me out_!”

“It’s to be expected,” the tall man said. “She’s Primary.”

_Primary, Primary, Primary_ echoed in Jennifer’s brain, and the voices responded, _Yes,_ and _What does that mean?_ and _How does he know?_

She waited out the isolation phase, and soon they were dangling carrots: _if you tell us where the Night Room is, we’ll let you bathe, we’ll let you sleep, we’ll let you eat_. Jennifer smirked and stayed silent, and eventually they fed her anyway—not much, but enough to keep her from starving. That was when she knew that Henri must be dead.

It was also when she knew that there was a chance she was going to survive. They needed information , and she was clearly their last shot, so they weren’t going to let her die, and they weren’t going to kill her unless she made them desperate. Knowing that gave her power, gave her leeway. She started fucking with them, mainly by critiquing their style choices, which were monochromatic in a boring way—no flair at all.

“Who exactly is holding who captive at this point?” the voices in the doorway demanded. “I can’t do it anymore. _You_ deal with her, Zalmon.”

“Oh my God! Did he just call you ‘Tall Man?’” Jennifer burst out laughing, and the tall man turned to her while the other slammed the door shut. “Is your _name_ ‘ _Tall Man_?!’ Oh my God, did your parents clock your whole weird _Phantasm_ vibe and just decide to run with it? Were you a tall baby? I have, seriously, _so_ many questions.”

“ _Enough_ ,” the Tall Man snapped. He took a breath and resumed something close to his usual air of sinister amiability. “Enough now. We’re all running out of patience here. Are you ready to tell us where we can find the Night Room, Jennifer?”

But he didn’t specify _which_ Jennifer, and he didn’t know he was surrounded by them, which made them all laugh harder. He grabbed her by the arms and slammed her into a chair like she was a rag doll.

That was when he started using more direct methods—the ice-cold water, the burns, the bamboo under the fingernails. But Jennifer knew how to cope with that, too. Most of the time. She felt the pain enough to remind her she was alive. When it got too intense, she just checked out, went into her head, saved those moments to deal with later. She drew monkeys on her walls with her bleeding fingertips.

But she knew it couldn’t go on like this forever. She was walking a fine line—if she held out too long, they would get frustrated and kill her; if she caved and told them where to find the Night Room, they would verify her information and then kill her. And she didn’t have a plan—not one she could execute in these dark and stuffy rooms. They never kept her in one place long enough to formulate an escape. They watched her too closely for her to kill herself.

There was, she realized, only one way forward. There was only one move she could make.

So, as days and weeks went by, as the walls closed in and the Tall Man grew impatient, she waited for the right time, the right circumstances. Until one day, one of her voices whispered, _Now_.

“All right,” she sobbed. “I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you how to find the Night Room. But you’ll need to take me with you.”


End file.
